In-Fiction Sexual Exploitation: blarrrrgh
greyorm:
Callan, that isn't a dissenting view at all. It plays well with my statements about different cultures. Where it dissents is whether or not someone should or shouldn't say something.
I'll say when you are playing with new people: yeah, it really IS up to you to speak up when your boundaries are violated. Because each new group is a new social culture. You can't expect to not have to suss that out by mutually communicating one another's boundaries. And I think assuming you don't/shouldn't have to say anything is just an excuse for cultural entitlement (at least of the culture of you).
Basically, it looks to me like you're advocating "non-communication...because who would know they have to communicate discomfort"? That doesn't make sense. And it simply doesn't work. Because there's no framework involved with that, just plain old basic social interaction stuff that even apes and monkeys do.
On the other hand, if we take your statement as true and that he shouldn't have known he should speak up when uncomfortable, then it is also true that James would have no right to complain about the situation, because how would anyone know he was uncomfortable and therefore be responsible for "doing something wrong" or "failing to accommodate James"? They wouldn't.
Gareth, I do not know how to say any of this without potentially seeming rude to you, so I'm just going to say it and you can take it however you take it: I do not accept your moral absolutism. You want to see it as misogyny and demeaning and etc, that's fine. You can rally against porn because it supposedly exploits women, call the admiration or open interest in female sexuality "objectification", and so on and so forth. I'm sure not stopping you or anyone else from doing so; but just because the post-modernist culture of current academia believes their subjective views of behavior are truth, doesn't make them so.
I'll stop there for fear of dragging this thread wholly off-topic into the political arena, but I think the above does segue into the discussion, or least in terms of culture-clash and assumption.
Regardless, to topic: James, I didn't get the sense from your original post that you were that clear about it towards the other person. I got the sense you didn't say anything, but I'm assuming that didn't come across for me in your post given your later statements here. So are you certain he was reading your "stop this, now" cues, and wasn't confused by them (and hence ignoring them), or taking the wrong signals from them?
Because there are a lot of people who keep insisting this person was a horrid person and should have known better and so forth, and knowing how non-monolithic culture actually is, I just don't buy that "well, ANYONE would have known that was WRONG" argument, especially in something as potentially . Seriously: a bunch of guys playing a game of pretend and one of the female characters is tricked/magicked/whatever into getting naked? That doesn't exactly scream "WRONG WRONG WRONG failure of socially acceptable behavior" to me, more like "par for the course".
Which is why even though looking at your #5, I don't really see that as contentious, given the other statements and situation. I still think #5 is contentious insofar as it is difficult to do, because you can't run about assuming everyone hasn't given consent, because you would literally end up not doing anything for fear of someone having not given consent. If only because you can't know what someone else considers objectionable, especially if you don't know them. It may well be that -- as in the case of saying "thank you" to your foreign mother-in-law -- you just assume it is fine to do. That is, you can't assume they haven't given consent, because you're not even thinking of it as an objectionable situation.
As such, I think #2 needs to include both "before play" and "during play, if issues arise". As per my situation with the guy in the card group, because stuff like that is going to happen. It just will. And it will happen with even less obviously touchy stuff (Years and years ago I knew a girl who freaked out after meeting me, and I had no clue why. I learned later it was because I used a word starting with the letter "v", and she had a thing about words that started with "v". Seriously).
Which is part of my response to Callan, above: yeah, you NEED to tell people when your lines have been crossed; it's an expectation. Period. It's part of how social species work on a basic level. Not doing so is really and truly a failure on their part.
Though, if as you say, you communicated clearly enough to him to stop the behaviors, then there was definite dickery happening and he was trying to harass you specifically for whatever reason. I don't know that it was even sexual -- it could just have been, "This guy is reacting when I do this, so I'm going to keep doing this to watch him react."
I just had that situation arise in my group, between myself and another player, who decided the "fun" part for him was doing everything he could do to stymie and frustrate me even if there was no point to it, because he liked watching me "freak". The player had to be taken aside by another player and told, "This is not cool. I don't care that you're getting a kick out of messing with him. Play the game or don't come." Which seemed to help.
Some people just get on a social-dominance kick, using it to establish group "identity" and hierarchy, and use whatever weapon is at their disposal: your frustration with your character being sexualized might have been that sort of hook if Earwig was that sort of player, or got into that sort of mode/mindset. He might have been trying to harass you, or he might have genuinely expected and believed everyone was in on the joke.
There's really nothing in the report so far that indicates either is incredibly more likely than the other. I think the important bit, though, is "How am I going to deal with this in the future?"
Ron Edwards:
I suppose most of you have seen this post coming.
Everyone who's posted so far has aired a viewpoint. That's fine. I'm moderating here to remind everyone that we are not here to lock horns. If someone says something you disagree with, log your disagreement and don't stay there fighting to defend yourself, even if, or especially if someone logs their disagreement with you. Such a disagreement is not an attack and doesn't diminish you or make you look stupid. Once the views are out in the open, then remember, it's James' thread, and it's up to him to work with the information and ideas as he sees fit.
(There are limits to "let live" - discourtesy and intellectual dishonesty, for instance. But those are dangerous waters to enter, in terms of challenging the posts, and I suggest you consult with me, or if the offense is grievous/obvious, tag the post for my review and don't give it the respect of your time.)
This has been a friendly reminder from me as moderator.
Best, Ron
Judd:
For the record, I wasn't punched in the mouth and the physical contact that did occur happened because of a thousand things that were occurring AWAY from the table and the table's events and frustrations were the straw that broke the back of the game.
That said, back to the thread.
Having played over skype (but not with a webcam) I have to wonder if the webcam player was also having trouble picking up on other's discomfort and your own discomfort due to non-verbal cues.
There is a real point where the game has to stop, the brakes have to be slammed on and if you are feeling shitty, you just have to express that and either get the game back on track or stop for the evening. It is difficult but it really needs to be a part of the culture.
That said, I have seen play like this without a webcam, at a con game with a stranger who had given me a thousand and one heeby jeebies before play, and I'd imagine it is more common than we think.
I am thinking of that one youtube vid with the DM talking about the female player's character going to hell and getting gang-raped and him recounting the story with pride.
Callan S.:
Quote
Which is part of my response to Callan, above: yeah, you NEED to tell people when your lines have been crossed; it's an expectation. Period. It's part of how social species work on a basic level. Not doing so is really and truly a failure on their part.
To me James is saying something like "This guy NEEDs to consider other people might be offended" then ironically your telling him that's not how it is, he NEEDs to tell other people...etc etc.
If your need was true just as much Jame's need could be true. I think, maybe wrong, you dislike how people will develop their own dislike into what they see as a truth and then apply that to others as if they have absolute right to. Which is why I can only end this particular post on a wimpy, undramatic note that: What I just wrote is some physical evidence to consider that I think is important (as a personal endorsement, as far as that might go).
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
Callan and Raven, give the rest of us a break for a while, please. You guys are getting abstruse beyond my grade and maturity levels. I'd like James to bring the thread to its specific purpose as he sees it now, and if that purpose includes the need of truth and the truth of needs, or whatever, then you're free to resume.
Also, here's the post I was working on.
As an example for contrast, here's a situation from a game I played in, let's see, this would have been in 1988 or early 1989. It was Champions! (And I'm super pissed-off that James played Champions and this show-the-boobies stuff steamrolled what might have been an excellent discussion about one of RPG history's most important games.) I was playing a character named Nocturne and Ran (Randy) was GM.
The insider/outsider context for the subject of my post is a little different from yours, James, but similar enough to be useful. All the other people in the group had known each other forever, and most of them had played in Ran's previous long-lived college game, a few years before. Ran had just moved to the city (this was in Chicago) and they decided to play a kind of "years later, the sequel" with the events of the previous game as history for this one. I had been invited in via one player's wife, a co-worker of mine.
However, by the time of these events, I'd been playing with the group for a year or more and we were a very tight bunch by that point; Ran and I were now buddies outside the game as well. I'm trying to avoid flashbacks and just riffing about the game in the post; the point is that although I wince at a lot of my self-reflections from that time, the game was quite socially solid and fun. I took the text in the Strike Force supplement very seriously and considered the experience point and Disadvantages rules to be the real meat of the game for thematic character development, what we call "arcs" now. The other players found this attractive and although they hadn't thought in those terms in their previous game, by now our characters were all pretty psychologically and mechanically interesting - and more importantly, very invested in their individual issues about different aspects of the problems we faced.
So, as a visitor and guest, a former player in the old group arrives and plays a character he makes up more-or-less on the spot as a kind of guest star character in the story. If I remember correctly, the (real) guy's name was John, and he was a very good artist; I still treasure the picture of Nocturne he drew. My impression of him right away was that he was funny and cool. My personal alarm bells went off only because his character was a classic Armored Guy, which, although some Champs veterans may disagree with me, usually entailed the most boring-ever same-old material possible. So that's different too - there was no creepy vibe.
Anyway, on to the subject of the post: John played his armored-type hero pretty aggressively and without much regard for an individual or personal take on the situation we faced in that session. As it happened, the events weren't much to do with Nocturne's interests, and I now realize that our group had an unwritten Screen Presence rule in effect. We "just knew" that if your character wasn't directly tweaked through relevant events, and if you didn't feel like the character would jump into action for his teammates' sake alone, then it was OK to be Color Man for that session and enjoy the break. We had absolutely no sense of everyone in the party pulling his weight at maximum tactical drive for every fight scene.
I want to be fair - clearly, Ran's Game Mark II had become a different creative beast than what John had played in previously, and different in genre too, a lot more like the loose and often rambunctiously individually-tracked Avengers of the 1970s than the crack paramilitary team ideal of the 1980s X-Men. So John was walking into something he didn't know about (and we probably couldn't have articulated it anyway).
What was the deal? Well, in some kind of fight with some kind of off-kilter foe or foes in some icy cave in the wilderness somewhere ... which is to say, not tied into the characters' back-stories or the current mess of entangled mysteries and sexy evil-occult stuff we were generally caught in ... I basically opted out of fighting at all. Not only were Nocturne's basically mental/Presence abilities not very effective against these things (I really can't remember what they were), but it worked for me to have him fade back and enjoy not helping. Nocturne could be a self-involved bit of a bastard although his heart was in the right place most of the time.
This pissed John off. When the fight was over, he had his character haul off and smack Nocturne, doing some damage, saying, "And that's for not helping." From that point on, we didn't speak much and I emotionally tuned out of the session in general - that's probably why I don't remember any of the details, although regarding most of our several years of play, I could cite you chapter, verse, and villain almost by session. Looking back, I think this event was one of those things groups choose not to remember, never comment upon or reflect upon, and essentially move on from without incorporating it into the institutional record of the game.
So James - no sex, no female characters, no exposed body ... but to us, a clear breach of what characters do with one another. Nocturne had a friendly rival with the mechanically-inclined regular character named Cyclone, for instance, but the idea of the two of them, or anyone else in the group, making an attack roll against one another was flat out of the question, for any of us. Given the social circumstances - was John or I the "outsider?" - I think we had absolutely no language at all to deal with the actions and emotions.
I bring this up because I think that to a large extent, we're looking at two variables in your account. One of them is the female character in an all-male group thing, compounded by rules which include mind control. James, as a long-time participant in the Adept forum and its mind control discussions, and also as having recently re-read Sex & Sorcery, I'm sure you can see there's a lot to talk about for that one. The other variable is the outsider-insider breach of local contract thing, and I think that you guys also had a similar curious situation in which you were in your way the outsider or new guy, and he was in his way the outsider, technologically as well as otherwise. So there's a disjunct about who's who at a very basical social level, and I think that in itself is like a kind of unstable chemical solution regardless of what in-fiction content gets co-opted into the resulting reaction. But whatever in-fiction content it grabs, the reaction itself is some kind of deal-breaker for someone, no matter what.
Best, Ron
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